Edit 21: There’s NOLA Place Like Home
There are trips you plan with itineraries and then there are trips where you don’t.
The perfect example is when you take your annual trip home to New Orleans for Mardi Gras parades, your birthday, and a very important standing appointment with powdered sugar and chicory.
This will be the latter. Obviously.
Going home is always a sensory experience. The air feels energized, sweeter. Conversations stretch, laughter reaching every corner of a room. Time loosens its grip. And before I’ve even fully unpacked, one of my parents will ask if I’m hungry—which is never really a question and more an opening line.
As I prepare to hit ‘publish’ on this Edit, I am seated on a plane, headed home to see my parents, to celebrate another year around the sun, and to be wrapped—lovingly and insistently—in the rhythms of a place that never quite lets you forget where you come from. New Orleans does not do subtle reunions. She will welcome me back with the embrace of flavors and noise and second helpings.
There will be beignets. Of course there will be beignets. Hot, pillowy, unapologetically messy and paired with a café au lait strong enough to reset your soul.
Eating them will feel less like breakfast and more like a ritual. I’ll do my best to avoid it, yet fail, accepting the powdered sugar on my clothes as part of the deal. It’s a baptism of sorts; a welcome home if you’re native, or if you’ve never been before, a rite of passage.
This snippet of the Mardi Gras season is exactly what I need: color and laughter and joy for joy’s sake. No productivity is required, no meaning needs to extracted. It’s simply celebration—of time with family, the season, the city, and the fact that life is meant to be enjoyed loudly every now and then.
And somewhere between king cake slices and family dinners, between familiar streets and even more familiar jokes, I will remember something important: going home always has a way of rebalancing you. It will remind you who you were before you learned to edit yourself too much.
I will come back to Charlotte so incredibly full—of food, yes, but also of something deeper and better. Gratitude. Belonging. A renewed appreciation for people and places that love you without conditions and feed your heart, mind and body like it’s their calling.
Home will always do that for me.
I’ll be sent home with sugar on my sleeves, a happy heart, and the firm belief that celebration is not a distraction from life—it’s part of the point.
Because there is NOLA place like home.
